


you are coming down with me (hand in unlovable hand)

by cherrysprite



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: And The Importance Of How You Show It, Canon-Compliant, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Misunderstandings, Past Character Death, Pining, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Silent Moments On A Gray Shoreline, Thank-Yous For Being There, Thank-Yous For Being You, Trust, hand-holding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29471667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherrysprite/pseuds/cherrysprite
Summary: It's the dead of August, Theo is acting different, and Liam wants to know why. In the end, Liam almost wishes that he hadn't.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Comments: 12
Kudos: 76





	you are coming down with me (hand in unlovable hand)

**Author's Note:**

> _I am drowning  
>  There is no sign of land  
> You are coming down with me  
> Hand in unlovable hand _
> 
> _No Children, The Mountain Goats (Tallahassee, 2002)_  
>  *Note - this fic is TITLED, but NOT BASED off of this song. Theo and Liam aren't a married couple who hate each other in this one. I just liked the lyrics <3
> 
> (Aaa! I said I was going to get this one up by March ninth at the latest, but here I am at 12:02 on March 10th. Fuck that, pretend that I didn't lie. Anyways, here's another twenty THOUSAND words of Theo angst, because I love you guys and I apparently show that through causing pain.)

Up until this year, summers for Liam have been a time for relaxation and nothing else. Ever since he can remember, from the first day school let out to the very last day before it started back up again, his life has been about three main things: sleep, snacks, and video games until his little werewolf eyes burn. According to he and Mason, who he’d created that list of three things with all the way back in elementary school to use as the ultimate summer guide, it was a perfect way of doing things. A few different things have broken into that lax schedule as life went on of course, including the odd vacation, lacrosse practices, and more recently, pack meetings, but up until this year, Liam almost never deviated.

Those are the key words: up until this year. Up until this year, Liam had never cared about what he spent his free months doing, and he probably would’ve stuck with his tradition of spending ninety percent of his time in bed when he wasn’t on the lacrosse field if it wasn’t for his stepfather. All it had taken was one casual comment from David about this summer being  _ ‘the last one before he graduates high school’ _ over dinner one night in June for Liam’s attitude to do a full turnaround.

From that night on, he’d made it his mission all summer to always be doing something. He’s been told by several people, Mason included, that most  _ normal _ people would take this time to be even  _ more _ relaxed than usual, but Liam doesn’t see it that way - probably because he isn’t a normal person. Even though there will be more summers after he graduates, there’s something about this one being the last one before that that makes taking advantage of it seem all the more important. 

It doesn’t even matter what he’s doing. Almost every day he has something planned, anything from driving all the way up to Sacramento with his newly-acquired drivers’ license and a certain chimera in the front seat just for fun to simply going with his mom a few minutes away from home to keep her company while she runs some errands, and he’s happy with all of it. He still has time for all of his responsibilities in the pack and as co-captain of the lacrosse team, but above all, this summer has been filled with days spent with friends, family, and the ones in-between. In total, Liam’s pretty sure that he’s only had around ten days in all of three months that he hasn’t had something to do, and that’s a pretty good record.

On the flip side, that record’s also why he’s so bored today. There are only so many things that a guy can do on his own when no one else is around to join him, especially one as easily-bored and social as Liam, and he’s pretty sure he’s done all of them. There’s not anyone to hang around with or give him any ideas today - his parents work during the summer, Mason and Corey are probably busy with each other doing things Liam would rather not ponder, and Liam’s pretty sure that Theo isn’t even awake yet - and it’s killing him, the last one especially. Liam guesses that he understands his newfound roommate’s love of sleeping in (after, you know, the whole  _ truck thing _ and all, a secret that Liam is still kind of mad about), but he’s also Liam’s favorite person to drag along with him, and he’s so bored without him that it almost feels insulting.

By now he should be out and about even if he’s not doing anything important, but instead the bottom half of his face is mashed into his pillow as he lays on his stomach in bed. His Instagram feed has never been less interesting. His muscles are starting to ache from laying this way as he scrolls past post after post of pure nothingness, passing pictures of his classmates who are having a lot more fun than him right now and memes that aren’t funny enough to break him out of his  _ Mood. _ He’s just about to shut off his screen and toss his phone face down on the bed for the third time that afternoon when he finally sees something worth looking at.

Liam pauses with his thumb hovering over an advertisement put out by their local coffee shop and almost  _ gags _ when he reads it. Chapman’s is one of Liam’s favorite places to go with his friends, but they’ve admittedly never been the best with product development - the post on their official Instagram account is advertising a limited-time offer to test out some of their new fall drinks before they officially come out, one of which is a cranberry coffee that sounds absolutely  _ vile. _ Liam only just  _ tolerates _ most kinds of coffee on a good day, and that combination of flavors has to taste nightmarish at best, but he doesn’t scroll past right away. Maybe most people would just cringe and try not to think about it if they saw that, but the idea of a new cranberry coffee makes a lightbulb go off over Liam’s head - it might be disgusting, and it might be a waste of money and time, but it's something to do, and he knows exactly who he wants to do it with. 

Without a second more of hesitation, Liam flings himself off of his bed and makes his way across the hallway to Theo’s room excitedly. He can tell that Theo’s finally awake by now, heartbeat quicker and more present than before, so he doesn’t feel too bad about knocking on the door. He raps lightly on the wood with two knuckles before gently opening it up. When he gets there, he finds Theo standing in front of the small desk pushed up against the same wall as the door, staring at the calendar hanging above it. 

“Hey,” Liam says, a small smile tugging at his mouth out of pure reflex; Theo’s hair is still a little messy from rolling against the pillow all night and his lips are still a little sleep-swollen and red, which Liam has to try  _ very hard _ not to think about before he gets too distracted. He has to take a second to shake that one off, blinking it away and moving on. “I just saw that Chapman’s is testing out their new fall menu this week. They’re trying to serve  _ cranberry coffee. _ Want to check out that disaster?” Liam asks, honestly starting to feel a little too excited about what’s bound to be an awful cup, but in hindsight, that probably has more to do with Theo.

Either way, Theo doesn’t seem to feel the same. Much to Liam’s surprise, Theo doesn’t go through his regular routine of acting put-upon and exasperated before agreeing; in fact, he doesn’t agree at all, or even spare him a _ glance. _ “Uh, sorry,” He says, faint but still decisive. The head shake that follows seems almost like an afterthought. “Not right now.”

Theo’s eyebrows draw together, creasing in the middle as he continues to stare at the wall calendar, and as Liam feels his stomach start to sink with disappointment, his do, too. His smile quickly dims when Theo  _ still _ doesn’t look at him, expression going confused instead as he tries to get some clue as to what Theo seems so focused on.

He can’t figure out exactly where Theo’s looking, but it doesn’t make sense either way. Liam knows for a fact that Theo only has three dates marked on his calendar - Liam, Jenna, and Davids’ birthdays - and none of those are in August. They’re both staring at a completely empty grid of dates, and only one of them knows why. It’s unsettling.

_ “...Okay…” _ Liam trails once he can’t look at it anymore, tearing his eyes away. “I’ll, uh, ask Nolan or someone, I guess. Let me know if you change your mind.”

He lingers in the doorway for a few seconds longer, hoping that Theo might finally break out of his weird trance and say yes, but Theo doesn’t even respond at all that time. He’s clearly checked out of this conversation, Liam having to leave without getting even an absent nod in his direction.

It leaves Liam feeling more than a little dejected, but he has to swallow back that disappointment as he turns away and leaves Theo alone. He walks slower than usual down the stairs and grabs his keys off the counter without nearly as much enthusiasm as he would if he knew that Theo would be in the passenger seat giving his two cents on his technique and dramatically groaning about how he fears for his life whenever Liam drives. Liam doesn’t even think the pointed  _ ‘I don’t even drive  _ that _ badly’ _ to himself  _ once _ during the whole drive, and he doesn’t get to remind anybody that he  _ ‘passed the written test with flying colors,’ _ either. It’s not at all a good argument to use, but the drive without it is deeply unsatisfying.

It’s only when he finally gets to the coffee shop that he realizes that he forgot to invite Nolan at all, but by then it’s too late. He’s not sure he really feels like company now anyway. On his own, Liam orders his gross coffee plus his regular hot chocolate with extra whipped cream, summer temperatures be damned, and sits in his usual table off to the side.

He’s never actually been here alone before, he realizes as he finds out just how  _ boring _ it is without someone else with him. Instead of fending off the little pieces of straw wrapper that Theo always flicks at him from across the table, Liam has his phone out within minutes of trying to ‘appreciate his surroundings’ while he waits for his drinks to get there. He manages to tune out most of the clinking of dishes and quiet chatter of people around him as he clicks around, and by the time someone sets down his coffee and hot chocolate, he’s well into a Google search for ‘significant days in August.’

As it turns out, there really  _ aren’t _ any - not any that would pertain to  _ Theo, _ anyway. Liam is fairly certain that Theo doesn’t care very much about the Catholic Feast of the Assumption, and he probably isn’t thinking too hard about National Creamsicle Day, World Elephant Day, or  _ Stuffed Green Bell Peppers Day,  _ either. Maybe International Cat Day could be a contender, but that also seems like a stretch.

Liam mulls it over over some unsurprisingly very shitty coffee - he honestly forgets what he’s even there for in the first place when he takes his first mistakenly-absent sip of it and almost spits it right back out across the table, the person who served it to him giving him a knowing and sympathetic look as he tries to recover, but then again, they’ve been throwing him that look ever since he came in here without his usual coffee companion. They hand Liam an extra napkin for the little bit of reddish coffee that’s dribbled down his chin as they pass by, and he’s pretty sure he hears them mutter an apology under their breath, too.

Liam, because he’s a decent person, still leaves a tip for the server, but doesn’t bother trying to be subtle about tossing the rest of his coffee on the way out. Not even the hot chocolate can get the bitter taste out of his mouth, and he knows he’d be a lot less annoyed about it if Theo was there to make fun of it with him, which only makes it worse.

He tries not to think about it too much as he makes his way back to his car. Theo is allowed to take a day off from Liam’s escapades and stare weirdly at an empty calendar if he wants to, and Liam isn’t allowed to be upset about that.

No matter how much he really kind of is.

\---

Thankfully, Liam manages not to be too hung up on the coffee situation for too long, no matter what the long series of late-night text messages sent to Mason seeking reassurance that the love of his life doesn’t, in fact, suddenly hate him have to say otherwise. All text crises aside, Liam is pretty much fine by the next day, having (eventually) let the one before roll off his back and gotten ready to take this one by the balls. He’s even okay with having the place all to himself that Monday while everyone else is at work, having plenty to do on his own this time.

He spends the first half of his day at the kitchen table, slumped over a notebook and planning lacrosse plays. His page mostly consists of a bunch of unintelligible lines and arrows meant to represent players and their moves across the field, but as he scribbles yet another one out and makes it even more confusing, he thinks about how he’s really not sure that even Mason or Theo would be able to decipher what any of it means. He has his phone propped up against the small vase of flowers on the table for this sole reason, FaceTime up and running; Liam likes to think of himself as a pretty good co-captain, but as much as it pains him to say it, Nolan has always been better when it comes to actually marking down the plays they think of.

Of course, Liam and Nolan rarely  _ agree _ on anything, so it takes Liam forever to even convince him to write the first play down, his absolutely terrible attempts at a diagram not helping his case at all. Hours of his morning end up devoted to arguing with Nolan about the plays, the players, and Nolan’s shitty WiFi connection that he shamelessly and continuously tries to blame on Liam whenever the call drops. 

There’s also the added distraction of Liam trying to sneak texts to Theo during every break in the connection or lull in conversation, but he doesn’t need to mention that part. He already hears enough of it from Nolan, who really has no leg to stand on. Liam can tell even without werewolf senses that Alec is somewhere behind the phone if the increasingly interesting blushy faces Nolan is making are anything to go by. Mentioning Alec’s name once is enough for Nolan to finally shut up about Theo for the rest of the call, so they both mind their own business when Liam decides to keep interrupting his own focus.

He keeps sending him texts throughout the afternoon, but despite not getting to spend a whole lot of time with Theo the day before, Liam doesn’t really mind it when none of them get any replies. From what he’s heard on more hectic days where Theo comes home and immediately collapses onto the couch in the family room, the busy pizza place that Theo works at is an absolute  _ nightmare _ in the kitchen, so Liam can’t blame him for leaving him on delivered when he genuinely has no time to even pull his phone out of his pocket. He’s already sent him ten today, most of which are just whatever dumb thing that had popped into Liam’s head in the moment anyway, and he still doesn’t bat an eye when he sees that they’re still unread by the time he leaves for practice later that day. 

He also doesn’t worry too much about it when Theo isn’t back when Liam gets home, either. Theo, the stubborn fucker that he is, likes to pick up extra shifts whenever he can because he will never let the Geyers even offer to let him borrow money for gas -  _ “You’re already paying for everything else, I’m not taking what I can do myself,” _ Liam remembers with a lighthearted roll of his eyes. 

He figures that that’s what’s happening today when he comes home to an empty, darkening house, so instead of seeking Theo out to bother him for a little while like normal, he heads straight upstairs. Once he gets there, he hops in the shower, changes into sweats, and promptly conks out on his bed, even a little excited as he does it, knowing that Theo usually brings good food home when he works late like this.

Liam assumes that Theo will wake him up in time to eat, but instead of a warm hand on his shoulder gently shaking him awake after dreaming of cheese pizza and fries, he comes to on his own, dazed and face feeling stiff from being pressed weirdly into the blankets for so long. He rubs his cheek as he sits up and looks around blearily, trying to blink some of the blurriness out of his eyes, but it’s not like it helps much. His room is completely dark, the sun having set hours ago, and he glances over at his alarm clock, confused and more than a little hungry. He’s only distracted by the wounded-sounding growl his stomach makes by the glowing green numbers showing that it’s 10:15, which only confuses him more. Someone should  _ be _ here by now.

It only takes a few seconds to tell that he’s completely alone here, no other heartbeats to be heard and no other scents to be smelled - not any salty fast food on the counter, not Theo’s work shirt tossed into his laundry hamper, and not Theo. His first instinct is to check his phone to see if Theo had texted him to tell him that he’ll be home later than expected, but all he sees is his last text - _ ‘i know ur past this, but would u kill nolan for me if i asked’ _ \- that still has the little  _ ‘Delivered’  _ notification right underneath it from hours before. 

His next instinct is to go through the house searching for him, which doesn’t make any sense, but hey, he’s tired and hungry and wants his chimera. Abandoning all logic, Liam shakes himself off and pads out of his room anyway, phone clutched in one hand and the other hand hanging limply by his side as he walks around. He heads downstairs first, checking in the kitchen and then looking out the window to see if Theo’s truck is in the driveway. Not only is it not there, but Liam also can’t see any headlights coming or hear any engines humming for a  _ while.  _ Puzzled, he absently grabs a granola bar out of the pantry to eat on his way back up the stairs. It’s not nearly as good as pizza would be, but he’s too focused on the task at hand to really think much about it. 

Directionless, he shoves the granola bar wrapper into his pocket and trudges over to Theo’s room. He thoughtfully switches his phone from hand to hand as he stands in his doorway, peering in at the perfectly-straight bed that Theo always makes as soon as he gets up,  _ always trying to compensate for taking up their space, _ Liam thinks with a mix of both amusement and sadness, and the still-blank calendar hanging above the desk as he tries to come up with something to text him. 

Five minutes later, he’s still standing in the same spot and staring at the empty spaces in August, and all he’s thought of is a simple  _ ‘hey’ _ and an _ ‘are you okay? It’s late.’ _

He’s not getting any points for creativity, but he types and sends them both with a heavy sigh, tearing his eyes away from the calendar for the second time this week and looking around Theo’s room one last time before he heads back to his own. He flops down on the bed, never taking his eyes off the screen even as his back hits the mattress and he scratches at his scalp to try and get a handle on himself.

_ It’s probably okay. Theo works late a lot. It’s natural that he’d be busy, _ he tells himself on a deep inhale, but he’s not too sure that he’s convinced.

The only thing Liam can do to combat that is try to distract himself, but it doesn’t work very well. He tries multiple things to keep himself occupied while he waits for his phone to vibrate, including reading other texts from Mason and Corey, running a comb through his hair when his fingers don’t work for him anymore, and even resorting to tidying up his room when staying in one place won’t cut it, and he still finds himself back and sitting on the edge of his bed with his phone in his hand only about twenty minutes later.

Unsurprisingly, Liam’s screen says nothing new other than  _ ‘Delivered 10:23,’ _ but this time, he can’t pass it off like all of the others. He can’t distract himself anymore, and all he wants to do is wait for a response, so that’s what he does. He waits, and he  _ waits, _ and he  _ waits _ until his eyelids are getting droopy and he’s laid back down under the covers and the only thing keeping him awake is the mounting worry growing in his gut. 

It’s been almost an hour when Liam  _ stops _ wondering  _ when _ Theo’s going to text him back and  _ starts _ wondering  _ if _ he’s going to text him back, wondering if he should just go to sleep and wait or get out of bed and go looking for him. Considering what kind of person Liam is when it comes to Theo, he’s definitely leaning more towards option number two. He’s just starting to think  _ ‘five more minutes and I’m going to get him,’ _ eyeing up the alarm clock and keys sitting on the bedside table, when he finally notices Theo’s typing bubble pop up on the screen out of the corner of his eye.

He just about falls out of bed scrambling to get to it, ripping the charger cord out just so that he can put his screen way too close to his face as he watches the three dots move up and down. Liam chews his lip anxiously the whole time, and he’s not sure what he’s expecting, but the short  _ ‘I’m fine’ _ Theo sends back has him biting back a groan of frustration anyway.

_ ‘I’m fine,’ _ Theo writes, and then a second later:  _ ‘It’s a busy night. Lots of tips. Wanted to take advantage.’ _

It vaguely occurs to Liam in the moment that he’s not really sure that the pizza place is even open this late at night, but a picture of Theo holding up four fingers, thumb tucked in - the visual signal the pack agreed on to verify that it’s really the right person on the other end of the conversation and not someone trying to lure them out or throw them off their path - comes through before the thought can finish forming, so he can’t really question it too much. His background is too blurred and dark for Liam to see for sure if it’s really the right place, but Theo’s still wearing his uniform in the picture, and either way, he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere. He’s safe, and that’s all Liam can really bring himself to care about right now.

He considers pushing further for a few seconds, but he ultimately just sighs and types out a simple _ ‘ok.’  _ He sets his phone back down on the charger and rolls back over in bed; he really is tired now, the stress having taken what he’d had from his accidental nap just two hours earlier right back out of him. 

\---

Theo is right there in the kitchen the next morning, passing around cereal bowls for Jenna and David and talking to them like he wasn’t out until God-knows-when last night, and Liam briefly wonders if he’s going crazy as he watches him move around. It’s quickly taken off of his mind by the sight of the box of Fruity Pebbles on the table, which he lunges for before he even greets anyone. One granola bar is not a good enough replacement for a meal, obviously.

\---

Just two nights later, Liam comes awake much less slowly and much less pleasantly, eyes shooting open wide as a quick but painful gasp  _ rips _ through his throat. He’s shaking and shivering as he reaches for the lamp, able to see his hand  _ trembling _ as he pulls it back towards himself when the light comes on. As he rubs it hard over his face and then all the way through his hair, he lets out a shaky sigh of both relief and exhaustion.

Pictures of Sean Walcott, his eyes milky white and face  _ drenched _ in blood from where Liam could see him while he was hanging onto the roof of Beacon Hills Memorial by the tips of his fingers flash through his mind every time he closes his eyes, the heels of his hands pressed against his eyelids doing nothing to dispel it. He holds them there until his vision clouds with colorful blotches, only taking them away when they finally cover up the sight of his face, and breathes out again.

He doesn’t get nightmares very often, but when he does, they hit him hard. The panic in his chest fades to nausea in his stomach as he breathes, taking in the stink of bitter fear and sweat and sadness that’s permeated the room and cringing at it as he thoughtlessly holds onto his forearm and rubs his thumb across the inside. On nights like these, it’s almost like he can feel Scott’s bite all over again, a dull ache that spreads itself up through his forearm and all the way to his shoulder; almost like he can feel the skin breaking, the burn of Scott’s teeth sinking into the soft meat of his arm, the absolute  _ agony _ of his muscle starting to  _ shred _ when Liam had slipped further down the wall, all over again. 

His thumb stops rubbing at the long healed-over spot and presses down hard on where the bite used to be until he feels like it would bruise. He takes his hand away with a wince and shakes his arm out, tired of the phantom pain, and takes a deep, exasperated breath. He’s definitely awake now.

As his own heartbeat starts to calm down and the blood stops roaring through his ears, Liam listens to all of the other heartbeats in the house, grounding himself to where he is - a lesson Scott taught him, way back when he was first turned -  _ Ironic,  _ really. Jenna and David’s are slow and steady from where they’re sleeping down the hall, Theo’s faster, but...not where it should be. 

Liam’s eyebrows furrow. It’s not unusual for Theo to be up already when Liam wakes up from a nightmare - he knows that Theo gets them much, much worse, and a lot more often - but normally he stays in his room afterwards, and if his own dream is bad enough, Liam will go and meet him in there. This dream was definitely one of those dreams, but right now Theo sounds like he’s downstairs, maybe in the kitchen. 

He guesses that’s okay. Most nights he ends up sitting on Theo’s bed for a while, knees tucked into his chest perched towards the foot of the mattress, but they usually end up going down to the kitchen at some point anyway. It’s just cutting out the middleman, even though the middleman is a lot more nice warmth after being used to the blankets, Liam thinks as he grabs the hoodie hanging off of his desk chair.

He creeps down the stairs slowly, trying not to wake up his light-sleeper parents or startle Theo by making too much noise before he sees him. On his way down, he imagines that Theo is going to be standing at the counter making a midnight snack, but instead he’s just sitting at the island with his laptop, rocking his barstool slightly with one foot on the cage underneath. 

There are no other lights on in the kitchen besides the motion-sensors above the counters and below the cabinets, so Theo’s face is almost completely illuminated in the white light from his screen. Liam starts to smile at that and the concentrated look on his face as he steps off the last stair, but it quickly fades when his foot hits the first floorboard. It squeaks just the tiniest bit underneath him, startling them both, but Theo the most - as fast as lightning, his heartbeat jumps, he slams his laptop shut with an audible click, and he turns to Liam with his eyes slightly wider than they should be.

He schools his expression right back into normal nonchalance within the second, but it’s nothing that distracts from the way his heartbeat is still a little too fast. Liam stares at him, stunned, until Theo finally speaks first.

“Hey,” He says, voice too light. His hands rub up and down his sweatpant-clad thighs, squeezing at his knees and loosening as they come back up, and Liam’s eyes drop down to them for a different reason than usual before they make their way back up to his face again. “What’s up?”

“...Nightmare,” Liam says slowly after a few seconds of struggle, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice at how weird Theo’s being. His gaze flits back to the closed laptop again as Theo nods, but pulls them away before he can notice.

“Oh,” He says, shifting a little where he’s sitting. As Liam watches him, he cannot believe that there was a point in time where Theo was able to hide everything about himself so well that he almost got away with murder multiple times. The way that Theo turns in his seat, never breaking eye contact with Liam as he leans back on the counter with his elbow, conveniently putting his laptop out of sight and supposed to be out of mind is so obvious and mind-boggling that Liam doesn’t even know what to think. Theo’s next question, a “What was it about?” is even worse; They  _ never _ ask each other what their nightmares are about as part of some unspoken agreement, no matter how much Liam has wanted to break it in the past.

It has Liam raising his eyebrow as he steps further into the kitchen. Theo doesn’t make any other moves to cover up his laptop, not being that stupid, but everything about him is still all wrong; his back is too straight and his face is much too open. “The, uh-” Liam clears his throat. “The hospital. The night I got turned.”

Liam’s never told him that story before besides the basics, never any details like the phantom pain and Sean’s eyes fading back to human green before his heart stopped, but Liam can’t help but think that the face Theo makes isn’t just about that. “Oh,” He says again.

“Yeah.”

They pause.

“...Hot chocolate?” Theo says after a few seconds of frankly agonizing staring, nodding towards the cabinet, and Liam is almost too grateful for the change in subject to think about much else. Almost. He’s still swallowing back some of his confused nerves as he follows Theo over to where he’s getting the hot chocolate mix out of the cabinet, and he doesn’t even pay attention to the sliver of tan skin exposed by the way Theo’s t-shirt is riding up his back - well, not really.

Liam unfortunately finds out pretty quickly that a change in subject doesn’t last forever; They make the hot chocolate in almost complete silence. They stand next to each other at the stove without speaking a word, staring down at the heating milk and cocoa powder as Theo pours it in and Liam stirs, and they go about drinking it the same way.

They lean on the counter as they drink out of their mugs, Theo staring out into space across the kitchen while the chocolate feels too warm in the pit of Liam’s now-uneasy stomach. Silence on nights like this one isn’t really unusual, but long, unbroken  _ stretches _ of it like this one decidedly are. Theo looks and  _ feels _ far away to Liam even though he’s right next to him, eyes focused on nothing in particular and movements absent and robotic, and Liam’s starting to get a really bad feeling about it.

Theo doesn’t even seem to notice it when Liam starts to stare at the side of his face, trying to pick apart his completely blank expression that proves impossible to read, and Liam can’t taste the hot chocolate as he sips on it while he does it. If it scalds the inside of his mouth, then that’s another thing that goes unnoticed.

\---

After a lot of thinking it over, Liam decides to be a little late to lacrosse practice the next day.

He has the plan in mind by the time he’s sitting in the kitchen for breakfast the next morning, so it’s easy to decline Theo’s offer to drop him off at practice on his way to work. Theo looks at him oddly when he says no, clearly not too convinced by Liam’s excuse of needing to get gas on the way home from practice anyway, but he doesn’t push. Liam listens for the sound of Theo’s truck leaving the driveway as he gets ready to go, something that’s normally a sign that he needs to get on his own way if he doesn’t want to be late, but instead of rushing out to his car, he goes straight across the hall.

He feels guilty as he slips through the partially-opened door of Theo’s room, knowing he’s invading the privacy that Theo has already had so little of in his life, but he pushes down the thought and reminds himself that he wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t necessary. Theo’s behavior from the night before hasn’t left his mind for one minute in the last twelve hours. All he can see is Theo’s hands  _ snapping _ his laptop shut and trying to  _ hide _ it, and if that doesn’t scream  _ weird, _ he doesn’t know what does. Liam  _ definitely _ understands how his mom  _ always _ knew he was looking at something bad on his computer as a kid now. Of course, Liam’s fairly certain that Theo wasn’t looking at anything that would’ve just gotten his  _ internet privileges  _ taken away for a week if he was like,  _ twelve, _ so he’s really not sure what he’s looking for as he goes in.

Liam looks around Theo’s room as carefully as he can, but the first sweep of his eyes over it doesn’t bring up the laptop, so he has to dig a little deeper. At least he has an advantage here; He’s a teenage boy. He knows where teenage boys hide things. He starts on the pillows, one of his favorite places to hide his somewhat private things without making it seem like they’re being hidden, meticulously moving and replacing them until he knows for sure that it’s not under any of them. Next is under the bed, which Liam has hidden things under so well that he’s forgotten about and lost some of them before, but he finds nothing but the stray dust bunny here and there when he looks. The last place is kind of a stretch, but he checks behind the curtains both near the floor and up on the windowsill. It’s a good hiding spot that’s never failed, but it’s still empty.

After all of that, he definitely feels like an idiot when he remembers that there’s a  _ desk, _ a desk with a  _ drawer, _ right in front of him. Liam rolls his eyes at himself as he sits down in front of it and opens it up, and sure enough, under a notebook and pen, the silver gleam of his laptop cover peeks out. He makes an absent note of it to replace those items when he’s done as he pulls the computer out and shuts the drawer. 

He’s not sure why he thought Theo’s computer  _ wouldn’t _ be password-protected, but he still groans when he sees the bar pop up. He glances down at the time in the corner - coach is really going to  _ kill _ him when he gets there - and sighs before getting to work.

Completely directionless, Liam tries whatever he can think of. His first guesses are the digits of Theo’s birthday in any combination they can go, Theo’s birthday spelled fully out in words, and any of Liam, David, or Jenna’s birthdays, but none of those work, so he has to go a little further. Next up is _ ‘Apple,’ _ the name of the cat Theo mentioned having in his childhood a total of one time, _ ‘Samuels,’  _ Theo’s mother’s maiden name, which Liam...isn’t actually  _ sure _ why he knows, the make and model of Theo’s truck, his school-issued password, and his favorite color. 

The guesses get even more nonsensical from there when none of those work. Liam is really grasping at straws as he types in just the word _ ‘August,’ _ and it takes everything he has in him not to hit the side of the screen with the heel of his hand in frustration when it still doesn’t let him through, especially when a notification pops up saying that he only has three tries left before the system locks up for another hour and takes a  _ picture _ of him for the owner to find. 

_ “For fucks’ sake,”  _ Liam hisses, pushing the rolling chair away from the desk. He rubs the bridge of his nose and breathes out deeply, then goes back to the computer one more time. 

He’s screwed anyway, so he uses his second to last try on a Hail Mary. His fingers angrily jab out a _ ‘D-u-n-b-a-r,’ _ stab at the  _ ‘enter _ ’ key, and-

The home screen opens up.

Liam’s stunned by that for a number of reasons, but he only gets a few seconds to just sit back and blink at the loading symbol before the icons on the desktop start popping up. He doesn’t have time to think about the implications of that  _ password _ right now, having to move forward.

He clicks on the _ ‘Files’ _ icon first, which only has three folders -  _ ‘Documents,’ ‘Audio,’ _ and  _ ‘Images.’ _ He clicks on Documents first, which is full of nothing but different school-related PDFs from the year before, then Images, which is just different pictures that Theo took of the pack at different gatherings and parties, and then Audio, which holds only a few downloaded mp4 files because Theo was kind of a grandpa when it came to technology that wasn’t a cheap phone from Best Buy and listened to music directly from his files before Liam found out and set him up on Spotify. 

The only other place Liam can check is his history, which he’d been trying to avoid. 

He opens up a new tab on Google, and as he hovers over the _ ‘view history’ _ option, Liam really hopes that he’s just going to find something embarrassing - he never thought he’d be crossing his fingers hoping that he’d have walked in on Theo watching  _ porn _ in the middle of the kitchen - but when he finally clicks on it, the log is completely cleared. 

Liam’s stomach sinks. Theo had to have done this right after Liam had finally gone back to bed the night before, and the thought makes him queasy. He’d really thought that Theo was past all of the secrecy of before, past all of the lying and plotting and  _ hiding.  _

He doesn’t want to think that Theo’s doing something bad, but the signs are all here. It’s in the late-nights spent away from home, in the faraway look in his eyes, in the hastily-shut laptop and the cleared history. Theo is hiding something.

Liam wishes that he could let Theo have his secrets, but he knows deep down that that’s not a luxury he has. Now, more than anything else, Liam almost wishes he never noticed anything at all.

\---

Just like Liam had wished he hadn’t noticed anything, he definitely doesn’t want to notice any  _ other _ details, but he ends up catching them anyway. Once a thought is planted in his mind, no matter how worrying or unpleasant it is, it won’t leave until it's dealt with, so he’s vigilantly looking for clues without even meaning to. His eyes follow Theo’s every move, every breath, every twitch of his expression, and they’re only at breakfast.

Theo, Liam, and David are all sitting at the kitchen table, finishing up breakfast, when it happens. Liam is a little quieter than usual, just shaking his head and smiling weakly when David ruffles his hair and asks if there’s something bothering him, but Theo seems too far into his own thoughts while he’s doing the dishes to notice. Liam stares down at the wood of the table while the sound of running water behind him numbs his brain.

He’s in almost a trance until Theo turns the water off, slipping the final plate into the drying rack and drying off his hands. “I have to go into work soon,” he hears him say to David from behind him.

It takes him a second to think about that, but once it registers, it takes a lot out of Liam not to jolt and look up at him, because Theo... _ doesn’t _ have work today. Maybe it makes him seem a little stalkerish or just plain pathetic to know Theo’s work schedule, but either way, Liam knows that Theo has every other Friday completely off, and Theo worked a Friday shift  _ last _ week. Liam’s heartbeat jumps up a beat, nervousness filling his stomach. In the past he would’ve just naturally brushed it off as Theo picking up yet another shift, but added onto all of the other suspicious things he’s seen Theo doing lately, he can’t choose to believe that again in good conscience. 

So he does the only thing he can think of. He waits at the kitchen table for a few more minutes until Theo leaves for  _ ‘work,’ _ pretending to scroll through his social media in the meantime, throws some lame excuse towards David about going to hang out with Mason, and heads up to his room to get ready to go. He gets dressed quickly, the only things he puts in the pockets of his jacket being his phone, wallet, and a bottle of cologne, and is out of the house within five minutes after Theo is. He says goodbye to David, ignoring his curious look, and sets off.

For the most part, gasoline is the only thing Liam’s able to smell, but he’s good enough at taking in Theo’s scent by now to follow the thin wisps of it down the road. He jogs to keep up, each step matching with the nervous pace of his heart, until he’s almost entirely out of Beacon Hills. 

He keeps at that speed until he hears Theo’s truck stop with the characteristic squeaking noise that makes Theo wince every time, then slows down, especially once he puts the pieces together as to where they are. The suburbs have started to fade into the woods without Liam’s notice, but now that he’s slowing down and really looking, it’s clear where they’re headed, and it makes Liam even more nervous. The Beacon Hills Preserve is almost never a good place to follow anyone’s scent to considering what kind of shit goes on there - it’d been the place he’d been chained up to a tree, the place he’d first found Theo while he was on a stakeout with Stiles, and the place he’d found Theo’s truck parked before he lived with him and the Geyers - which only makes him more inclined to follow him in. 

Theo is already well into the Preserve by the time Liam gets there, but Liam stops at the perimeter by the entrance sign and pulls the bottle of cologne out of his pocket. He takes a second to spray it on his pulse points on his neck and wrists, breathing it in deeply when he’s done. It does something to settle his nerves at least a little bit - it’s not  _ his _ cologne. He’d swiped it from Theo’s dresser right before he’d left the house to cover his scent with, which is what he reminds himself to break out of his trance and rub a little bit of Preserve dirt overtop of it. He figures that if Theo’s going to catch any scent out here while he thinks he’s alone, Liam should convince him that it’s just the wind picking up his own.

It’s not an excuse to wear Theo’s cologne. It’s not.

Taking one last deep inhale of Theo’s scent, Liam gets on his way. He has to move slowly through the trees to avoid all of the stones and branches in his path, but he eventually gets far enough that he sees a glint of Theo’s truck paint in the sun. He sees Theo at almost the same time, just then getting out of the drivers’ side, and Liam makes the split-second decision to duck behind the trunk of a fallen tree. His heart thumps hard in his chest and he presses his fist over it, silently pleading for it to calm down before Theo hears.

Once he thinks he’s in the clear heartbeat-wise, he shifts ever so slowly so that he’s crouched down and can peek over the top of the wood. His view - and therefore his face - are obscured by a couple of long-dead twigs still attached to the tree, so he watches Theo through crackly wood and half-disintegrated leaves. 

_ (Somewhere in the back of his mind, Liam wonders if this is the same fallen tree that he’d sat on months ago, back when the wood wasn’t nearly as dead and some of the leaves were still hanging on. The one he’d sat on with Theo - or more been  _ forced _ to sit on with Theo - the day in March that Liam decided to follow Theo’s scent and bother him into helping him with his calc homework only to find him half-asleep in the backseat of his Toyota. He wonders if this is the same tree that Theo had sat him down on, taking hold of his shoulders after he’d managed to dodge the first three misguided-anger-fueled punches Liam had thrown, and the one he’d dug his claws into trying to stay calm as Theo had tried to lie before finally admitting that he’d been living out here. If he looked a little closer, he might still see those gouges in the bark, but he’s not going to. He has other things on his mind now, so he’ll think about it later. In the meantime -) _

Liam prides himself on having gotten better at reading people in recent months, werewolf advantages in use or not, but as he watches Theo take slow steps around the clearing, he’s got nothing. The only thing that he can piece together out of everything he’s seeing is that Theo looks like he’s _ lost. _ His footsteps speed up, falter, and slow down before repeating the process or stopping entirely just to stand around for a second first, hands in his pockets, his face entirely neutral and his chemosignals a complete and unreadable mess. It hurts Liam’s  _ brain _ a little trying to pick them apart the way Theo himself taught him to, meaning that not even Theo’s level of skill could figure out what the hell he’s feeling. 

_ ‘People only feel one emotion at a time’ _ his  _ ass. _

He doesn’t know what he was expecting when he followed Theo into the woods - a panic, a confrontation, maybe, if he ended up getting caught,  _ something, anything _ \- but no matter how long Liam sits and watches him, he gets absolutely nothing, and after a while it’s hard for his mind not to start going off in directions of its own. By the time fifteen minutes have passed and Theo has done nothing more than kick around the pebbles and leaves, Liam has started to go through all of the conceivable possibilities. Maybe he’s waiting for someone to meet him out here. Maybe he’s waiting for some _ thing _ to meet him out here.  _ Drug deal? Supernatural information swap? _ Maybe he’s trying to gather information on the terrain, staking out the best footing for a potential fight.

_ Or maybe,  _ Liam thinks nonsensically and way too hopefully, Theo’s just out for a day on his own and didn’t want company. Maybe Corey and Mason will end up coming out of the woodworks and they’ll all sit down and have a nice little picnic and talk about how  _ nice _ Liam is. Or maybe it  _ is _ just a drug deal. Hell, Liam wouldn’t even be  _ mad _ if it was a drug deal, there’s always  _ rehab _ for drugs, but Liam doesn’t get to go too far down that scenario’s path because the sound of a branch snapping nearby nearly startles him half to death.

He hears it just a split second before Theo does, ducking completely behind the cover of the fallen trunk so that he’s practically laying on his stomach. He shifts around to make sure he wasn’t the one who snapped it and promptly startles himself even more when he spots none other than Sheriff Stilinski’s work boots. He just about  _ brains _ himself on the tree his head  _ whacks _ into as he whirls to look up at him. From where he’s also hastily hidden behind a tree - still-standing, this time - Stilinski looks at him with wide, imploring eyes and a finger over his mouth.

Back in the clearing, Theo is on edge again, looking around and scenting the air. Liam bites down on his lip so hard he almost tastes blood as if it’s going to do anything to calm his frantic heartbeat, and the Sheriff doesn’t look much better. His back is entirely pressed up against the tree, face crushed up in a grimace until Theo finally stops looking around so suspiciously and goes back to what he was doing, shaking out his shoulders.

As soon as Theo’s back is turned, Stilinski lunges for Liam and grabs him by the wrist, yanking him up and away. They break quite a few branches in their rush to get away, but by the time Theo catches it and whirls around to look again, they’re long out of his sight even if he’s not out of theirs’.

Liam only gets a few seconds to catch his breath before it’s all stolen out of him again, stomach sinking with a sick feeling as he really  _ looks _ at the Sheriff.  _ Fuck, _ the  _ Sheriff. _ If Noah Stilinski is out here, that means that Theo has been suspicious enough for a long enough time that he’s managed to attract police attention. Something is seriously up.

Theo spends another minute looking around the clearing critically, but as soon as he’s done, Liam sinks back against the tree Stilinski’s hidden them behind with a huffed-out sigh, feeling all of his energy leave him at once and replace itself with pure resignation. He can feel the bark scratching up the back of his jacket as he slumps down, but he can’t bring himself to care.

“...You’ve noticed it too, then,” Liam says miserably after a second, staring down at the ground and shoving his hands into his pockets. Next to him, Stilinski takes a deep breath.

“...I have,” He admits, and Liam lets out another quick, doomed breath before sucking it back in.

_ God,  _ Liam thinks. _ God, Theo, God. _ “So what was it, then?” He asks, voice sharp and sardonic even though his eyes sting and he wants to  _ cry. God, Theo… _ “Hm? Where were the footprints? Where was the blood?”

Stilinski winces. “...There was some here in the Preserve,” He says, and even though Liam was the one who  _ suggested _ it, the confirmation still makes him want to fall to the ground. His eyes shoot up to the Sheriff’s,  _ desperately _ hoping that he’s kidding, but there’s nothing on his face but apprehension.  _ “His own,” _ Stilinski rushes to add, but in all honesty, it doesn’t make Liam feel much better. He scratches his back up even more as he slumps further against the tree. Stilinski sighs, his expressions shifting as he tries to put it into words. “The department...well,  _ Parrish and I, _ we do routine checks of the Preserve now. We found it on a branch a few nights ago and it was a match. Now, we know he very well could’ve just tripped and cut himself, but it was fresh, and it doesn’t tell us anything about  _ why _ he would’ve been out here that late at night,” He explains. “Normally we’d just write it off as an accident on a late night walk, but...with him…”

“You have to look at every possibility,” Liam finishes numbly, thinking back to the deleted history, Liam’s own  _ blood-on-the-branch _ clue. “Yeah. I know.”

Liam’s eyes start to sting even more, dropping back down to the ground, but he can still see the way the Sheriff’s face changes into something that looks a lot like sympathy. He reaches out to squeeze his shoulder and Liam sniffs quietly. 

“Look, kid…” He starts gently. “I know you don’t want him to be guilty. I don’t want him to be, either.” Liam looks up at him, surprised, but he pushes right through. “He did some great work for me and Scott during the Monroe search, and he gave us any information he could remember about the Dread Doctors, no problem. Hell, he ran _coffee_ _orders_ for the whole department for months. Only one who could get mine right,” He says, shaking his head. “And as much as I would be killing myself by saying this maybe two years ago, I think...I think he’s a good kid,” Stilinski says. It’s kind and truthful in a way that makes Liam’s chest _ache_ thinking about how Theo is still roaming around the woods somewhere behind them. “But you and I both know that being a good kid and doing not-so-good things is something that can go hand-in-hand.”

Liam can barely register what Stilinski’s saying on time, all of his words echoing in his head a few times before they finally stick, but he manages to nod jerkily. “What are you-” He says through a tight throat, coughing. “What’re you gonna do to him? If- if you find something, I mean.” 

The Sheriff’s face softens. “...Let’s just say that for now, it’s a  _ ‘cross-that-bridge’ _ situation,” He says, squeezing Liam’s shoulder again. “You know that I was near the top of the list when it came to people who hated Theo Raeken, but these things are complicated. I haven’t found anything yet, so I don’t know what allowances I can make, but...I’ll try.” 

Stilinski’s words don’t make him feel  _ that _ much better, but he likes the possibility of mercy for Theo a lot better than the alternate scenarios he’s imagined, scenarios like Theo being thrown in prison or driven out of town or,  _ fuck, _ somehow getting put back in the ground Liam pulled him up out of. Somehow Liam already knows that no matter what Theo could’ve done, no matter how bad or how grisly, watching his punishment would hurt more than the crime. Maybe that says something about him and his priorities, but he can’t change it and he can't bring himself to feel bad.

It takes him a minute to realize that the Sheriff is still talking, but he catches the end of it. “I want to believe that he’s innocent, and until then, that’s what he is to me. Innocent. But I can’t leave it like that. It’s my job to figure it out,” He says just as Liam comes back online, looking him in the eye directly enough that Liam knows to nod. Stilinski gives him a little smile, looking like he wants to say something else, but his eyes suddenly flick to somewhere over Liam’s shoulder and his expression goes right back to tight and assessing. “Ssh, he’s on the move. Come on.”

Snapping out of the rest of his daze, Liam shakes himself off and follows Stilinski to where he guides him. He times his footsteps just well enough that he manages not to hit any obstacles the whole way to where they trail him to the Preserve creek. The two of them hide behind the same tree, peeking around either side to watch as Theo approaches the water, and see as he does...absolutely nothing.

He just stares at the water for a while as it ripples and shines in the sun. The only thing of any interest Theo does is reach down to dip his fingers into it just once, shivering and flicking his hand out to get it off, but he doesn’t leave. He’s so still, so  _ contemplative _ that it’s  _ unsettling,  _ and it makes Liam want to squirm.

They watch him like that for at least a half an hour, bewildered and confused, until Theo finally leaves. They both startle into action when Theo starts to move again, shoving his hands into his pockets with a heavy sigh and heading back to where the truck is parked while Liam and Stilinski rush out of the way.

After they hear Theo’s ignition start up they can finally breathe again, but Liam’s muscles stay just as tense as they were minutes ago even now that they’re alone. He listens to Theo’s truck leave the Preserve, rumbling off into the distance, and sighs deeply.

“I, uh, have to get home before he gets there without me,” He explains quietly, making some vague hand gesture back in the direction he came and starting to turn. 

Stilinski stops him before he can walk too far off. “Liam,” He calls. Liam pauses in his place and turns back around. “You tell me if you see anything, okay? You know what number to call.”

If it’s even possible, Liam’s heart falls a little more. He doesn’t like the idea of playing Theo’s parole officer at all, spying on him and invading his privacy, but he guesses that it’s not like he hasn’t already been doing that. That thought makes the sick feeling in his stomach even worse, but he nods weakly in agreement anyway. Stilinski looks at him consideringly.

“Liam,” He says again, this time more directly. It’s the kind of tone that softly demands attention, so Liam has no other choice than to give him what he has left. “I know you care for him a lot, and I know how this looks, but I want you to listen to me closely and know that I’m not lying. Right now, this is nothing more than us guys wanting to know what’s going on. Nothing more than idle curiosity,” He says. “It’s not an investigation, it’s not an arrest, it’s not a conviction. It’s you wanting to know that the guy you care about is safe and me wanting to know that I don’t have to throw another teenager in a cell for something he might not be able to control. That’s it. Do you understand me?” He asks.

Despite Liam’s best efforts at skepticism, he can’t do it; the Sheriff’s heartbeat is steady the whole time, so Liam allows himself a little peace of mind. After a few seconds, he nods, not even feeling embarrassed about the Sheriff’s comments about his feelings for Theo - he doesn’t have it in him to pretend that he’s not right.

Stilinski, father of a once-teenage son and knowing how to show it, squeezes Liam on the shoulder one last time before he walks off to his squad car. Liam takes a little bit more time to set into motion, but he takes off not too long after.

Liam’s return home isn’t as fast as he thought it would be; He  _ does _ plan to get home quickly in the beginning, but as soon as his feet hit asphalt after running the rest of the way through the Preserve, the fight leaves him pretty fast. He figures that it doesn’t really matter if he’s home before Theo either way, so he walks the rest of the way back with his hands in his pockets, chin angled towards the ground. It gives him a lot of time to think - or  _ not _ think, more accurately, since he hears pretty much nothing other than white noise the whole way back - and a lot of time to clean himself up before he goes back in the house. He washes off the smudges of Preserve dirt and Theo’s cologne with the garden hose before going inside.

He thinks he’s done a pretty good job of making himself seem normal by the time he walks inside, but apparently Theo’s cologne is persistent. David smiles at Liam when he comes in and sits at the kitchen table with him. He only glances up absently at first, too engrossed in the puzzle he’s halfway through - he’s a dork like that, plus he probably misses Jenna on his off-day, so Liam starts helping him put a corner together - but Liam isn’t out of the woods for long. Liam thinks that he’s completely in the clear when Theo comes into the kitchen to grab the box of Oreos out of the cabinet and doesn’t seem to notice anything different, but he’s  _ not _ anticipating  _ David. _

David looks up again to smile at Theo coming in. “Hey,” He greets. “Good day at work? Sorry I missed you when you came in. You got home quick.”

“Yeah. They didn’t need me long today,” Theo says, putting a few cookies aside. “ _ Over _ -staffed for once.”

“Good for you,” David says with a grin. He’s just about to go back to his half-finished picture of a meadow, taking a deep breath, but pauses. His eyes fall on Liam before Liam even knows what’s happening, curious. “Liam, are you wearing  _ cologne?”  _ He asks. “New one?”

Liam just about chokes when he realizes what he’s talking about, especially because he can hear  _ Theo _ sniffing the air too. “Oh,  _ uh,  _ yeah,” Liam stammers out, face feeling hot. “It’s, uh, Theo’s. I...couldn’t find mine.”

Liam is painfully aware of Theo’s eyes on the side of his face as David smirks.  _ “Ah,”  _ He says, voice going sly. “So I take it you  _ weren’t _ out with Mason, then.”

Liam really isn’t sure what he means by that at first, mind too frazzled to even be thinking about the implications of it, so it’s by some incredible luck that he doesn’t let the confused  _ “What?” _ on the tip of his tongue slip out before he catches up. He coughs when David’s words finally snap into place, but at least it makes sense. He laughs, nervous, for a completely different reason.

“Caught me,” He says, a weak but joking lilt to his voice, and David grins and reaches across the table to punch him on the shoulder good-spiritedly.

He thinks that the situation would have been a lot more bearable if he hadn’t made the mistake of looking over in Theo’s direction. Their eyes meet immediately, contact holding for a solid three seconds and making Liam’s mouth go dry before Theo finally breaks it. His expression is just as unreadable as it’d been back in the Preserve as he takes his food and walks away, and Liam’s gaze falls back down to the puzzle pieces on the table. 

Liam sighs to himself. He might’ve spent hours trying to pick that single look apart if he’d seen it just mere days ago, but he has too much of Theo to try to sort through right now to even try. 

\---

Unlike most of that summer, Liam spends the next week doing seemingly nothing at all.

He’s not  _ trying _ to draw attention to it, but with the busy summer he’s had so far, his sudden presence at home doesn’t go without some questioning. Jenna notices it right away, and her questions and comments about it are only joking the first couple of times around. After the second empty-scheduled day passes, she and David start asking him in much more concerned ways if he’s feeling okay, if something happened and he needs their help with anything, and Liam quickly grows used to giving them excuses -  _ I’m just tired, I’m just not in the mood today, I have things to do here.  _ Even Theo, who’s been just as stuck in his own little world as Liam, looks at him oddly when he overhears him tell Jenna for the fourth day in a row that he’s not going anywhere.

Theo doesn’t ask about it like the others do, but his eyes on him still hurt worse than anything. He looks at Liam critically sometimes, which wouldn’t be unusual if Liam didn’t know that Theo isn’t getting anything this time around; Theo can usually read Liam frustratingly fast like a left-open book, but it’s obvious that he has no  _ idea _ what’s going on in Liam’s head now.

After a while he must think it’s nothing since the looks stop, probably figuring that it’s just Liam being weird as usual, but it  _ isn’t _ nothing. It  _ isn’t _ nothing, even though it doesn’t  _ look _ like it, even though Liam positively  _ hates _ himself for it, and it’s happening in Theo’s own home. It makes Liam feel  _ sick. _

Liam’s on Theo-surveillance twenty-four-seven these days, and if that’s not bad enough to think about, there’s also the ever-looming reminder that the Sheriff never even  _ asked _ him to be. He’d like to say that most of his observation is on accident, spurred on by his nervousness like it’d been in the beginning when he’d checked Theo’s search history and followed him into the Preserve, but that’s a flat lie. Everything he’s doing, every sneaky background action and every shift of a watchful eye is on purpose now, and he can’t bring himself to stop.

It makes his stomach churn thinking about what a creep he’s being, how he’s invading Theo’s privacy in the one place he trusts not to have someone poking around in his life uninvited by watching his every move, but it’s making him feel even sicker worrying what could happen if Liam  _ doesn’t _ find out what’s going on. For all he knows, Theo’s life could be about to fall apart, and he can’t let that happen. He’s watching silently from the side as he recognizes the pieces and fails to find any way to put them together. 

Theo’s carrying himself differently now, a firm set to his shoulders and a perfectly stoic, manufactured expression on his face like the one he used to wear years ago, the one Liam has been grateful so many times over that Theo doesn’t  _ have _ to wear anymore. He’s not talking as much, either. He used to be full of sarcasm-laced and vivid conversation once he adjusted to living with Liam and the Geyers, always with some comment or joke on the tip of his tongue, but now he’ll ghost through rooms with scarcely a nod if he can. He’s civil and nice to David and Jenna when they do talk, the perfect picture of comfort and goodness to anyone who isn’t looking as closely as Liam is, and it makes him hurt all over.

After a while Liam starts to wonder if Theo’s been like this all along, if this is really new or if he’s been sitting at the dining room table complimenting Liam’s mother’s cooking and asking David about his day and genuinely wanting to know the answer all while holding some big secret and a tension in his body Liam was too dumb to notice. He wonders why Theo’s doing whatever he’s doing at all, if he joined by choice or if he’s been pulled in by something else. Wonders if this is another one of Theo’s awful self-defense tactics because he never seems to get that the Geyers won’t kick him out, that he doesn’t  _ have _ to  _ secure another possibility  _ for when they  _ do, _ or if he’s being forced just like he was when he was a child with the fear of death held over his head. Wonders if through all of his muddled and complicated chemosignals there’s determination, or resignation, or fear. 

Most of all and  _ worst _ of all, Liam wonders how long it’ll be until Theo decides to leave one night and never comes back, how long it’ll be before the next time Liam sees him is weeks later when he’s brought into the station in cuffs with bloodstained hands or wheeled into the morgue in a body bag, and he hates that he’s thinking that way. Those are the thoughts that Liam muffles the panic of into the bunched-up blankets caught harshly between his teeth at night, both on nights where Theo is right across the hall and he runs the risk of being heard and especially ones where he isn’t and Liam could scream into the void for all he cared.

Despite how quiet he manages to keep it, it starts to get to be too much sitting around the house and watching Theo repeat the same moves over and over again. He starts to go a little stir-crazy staying in one place, unable to block out the noises of a brain that’s been in crisis mode for weeks. 

He needs a second opinion, but there aren’t many people he can ask. He could ask his mother, who generally seems to know anything about Theo that there is to know when Liam comes to her for advice under normal circumstances, or people like Mason and Corey, mutual friends who are around a lot, but both of those scenarios would come with a slew of questions Liam wouldn’t know how to answer. Jenna would worry the second Liam walks into the room and says Theo’s name with even a  _ tinge _ of nervousness, demanding to know everything that’s going on in her soft but commanding mother way, and Mason and Corey would be too curious not to end up letting details slip to other members of the pack - other members like  _ Scott _ and  _ Stiles,  _ which would spell disaster. 

He can only think of one other person to ask. 

The first time Liam leaves the house for something other than lacrosse practice is to go to the grocery store. It’s convenient enough since Jenna needs some tomatoes for a new recipe she’s planning on trying out that weekend, but Liam isn’t there only for them. In fact, Liam forgets to grab the tomatoes at all. All he has is a box of Oreos -  _ Single _ -Stuf, because Theo likes them more than  _ Double _ -Stuf, because Theo is a weirdo - by the time he gets to checkout lane four. There’s a shorter line over at lane three, but like he reminded himself before, he’s there for a non-tomato, non-time-sensitive reason.

Once it finally gets to be his turn at the checkout, he makes the idiotic move of putting his  _ one _ item all the way back on the conveyor belt so that he and the woman at the register have to watch it slowly slide down, Liam in genuine pain and her in amusement and what has to be incredulousness. Liam shoves his hands in his pockets, willing the ground to open up underneath him and suck him right down, and doesn’t look up at her until she speaks.

“Hey, Liam,” Jess Strathmere says, voice dryly amused to match her one raised eyebrow. “Important grocery run, huh?”

Liam has only talked to Jess a handful of times for two reasons. She was a grade ahead of him in high school and they talked maybe once or twice because they shared a class one semester, but they only really started seeing each other around again when Theo started working at this store before getting his job at the pizza joint and became friends with her. Liam wouldn’t be surprised if he was an idiot  _ every single one _ of those times. “You  _ do _ know that we have a self-checkout, right?” She asks, a smirk on her face. She and Theo do make a good match when it comes to snarkiness.

“Yeah, uh- sorry,” Liam stammers, balling his fists in his pockets and rocking back a little on his heels. “I actually just wanted to talk to you about something and didn’t really know what else to do.”

Jess’s face shifts from amused to curious, raising her eyebrow again for a different reason. She doesn’t stop looking at Liam as she reaches over to flick her lane’s availability light off, much to the displeasure of the woman behind Liam who has already unpacked half of her groceries onto the belt, but Jess ignores her. “Yeah? What’s up?”

“Well, I just- don’t tell him I’m asking you, but…” Liam trails, cringing as he realizes how much worse he’s making this sound the longer he draws it out. “I was wondering if you noticed Theo acting any different, lately.” Liam tries to smile and play off his next words as a joke, but his shoulders slump in on him regardless. “I think you’re probably seeing him more than I am right now.”

“...I actually haven’t seen him in person too often the last couple of weeks,” Jess admits, eyebrows furrowing as she scans Liam’s Oreos like she’s only just now realizing it. Liam bites back a sigh. “But, yeah, maybe. He’s been through here a few times to visit, and he might’ve seemed a little different than usual. Less fun, more...sad,” She says. She shakes her head, one corner of her mouth tipping up in a tiny smile. “I was wondering if you broke his heart or something. Thought that maybe these cookies were an apology present.”

Liam laughs weakly as Jess reaches out to hand him his box. “We’ll see,” He says, sounding a little breathless. Jess nods. “Hey, thanks, but...I’m serious. I really need you to-”

“Don’t worry,” Jess interrupts. “The vague details of your lovers’ quarrel are safe with me. I won’t bring it up.” 

Liam listens to her steady heartbeat as she says it, but he doesn’t really need to to know that she’s being sincere. He guesses he’s just used to the sarcastic type now. “Thank you,” Liam says, truly grateful and putting it into his voice without any trouble, and sets off. 

Jess’s input on the situation hasn’t gotten him any closer to figuring out what Theo’s doing and it doesn’t make him feel any better about the outlook, but it somehow makes him feel less like he’s losing his mind. He’s almost completely out of the store, busy enjoying some of that relief, when he realizes that he forgot the tomatoes. He stops right in front of the automatic doors already opening for him, sighs deeply, and turns back around.

After an even more awkward interaction with Jess after he came through her line a second time with heirloom tomatoes in hand five minutes after he left, which gets him  _ thoroughly _ laughed at by her and another young worker who Liam doesn’t even  _ know,  _ Liam returns home. He makes a point of setting the tomatoes down on the counter next to the fruit bowl since his mom is in the kitchen watching, and he’s just reaching for the cabinet to put the Oreos away when Theo comes in next. 

Both of them pause when they make eye contact, heartbeats stuttering in their chests. Theo looks tired, the dark circles under his eyes getting deeper every day, and Liam swallows at the sight. Instead of greeting him, Liam shakily holds up the Oreos to show him. 

Theo gives a weak smile in thanks, so instead of putting them in the cabinet, Liam leaves the box right on the counter for him and flees up to his room. He doesn’t look at Theo or his exhausted frame as he passes, eyes fixed firmly to the floor as he hopes to God that his mother didn’t notice any of that terrible interaction.

\---

Because Liam has no real evidence to report through the Sheriff’s mostly-unused contact sitting in his phone besides the obvious and unhelpful  _ ‘he just  _ seems different _ ’  _ every couple of days, Stilinski shows up to the next pack meeting.

Stilinski being there isn’t the problem. Liam had figured that he’d show up to one eventually, it being a neutral spot to watch his person of interest in a natural setting, so his presence there isn’t what sets Liam off. 

The problem is that Stilinski doesn’t  _ tell _ Liam that he’s coming beforehand, so it feels like a punch straight to the stomach when Liam looks up and accidentally makes eye contact with him across the room. He’s managed to lose himself in a customary game of  _ Mario Kart _ on Scott’s couch with Mason, Malia, and Stiles, each of them shoving at each other with sharp knuckles and elbows, but Liam doesn’t get to bask in his success over Mason and Stiles for too long before he notices him there. 

He’s standing in the kitchen talking to Melissa when Liam sees him, and even though the conversation doesn’t look like anything too serious, the glow of his win drains right out of him and replaces itself with a heavy lead weight in the pit of his stomach. A bolt of panic shoots up his spine and his heart skips so hard in his chest that he can  _ feel _ it, his mind going straight to the worst-case scenario -  _ he’s still in uniform. _ He’s still in uniform, straight from the station with his gun in its holster and cuffs on his belt, and Theo isn’t even  _ here _ yet.

It doesn’t happen soon enough that Liam can avoid getting a strange look from Malia at his sudden drop in mood, but luckily, the Sheriff catches his eye and seems to know exactly what he’s thinking - Liam must  _ look _ just as stricken as he feels. He disarms that train of thought with a single shake of his head, and it takes everything Liam has in him not to collapse back into the couch.  _ He’s not here for Theo - not to arrest him, anyway. _

Liam tries to flow back into his mood from before, but part of him is back to buzzing on high-alert again. Mason is trying to talk to him about something Liam lost track of minutes ago, most of his attention devoted to what the Sheriff is doing. He overhears Stilinski claiming that he’s there because it’s one of the last meetings of the summer and he wants to see everyone all together before they head back off to their various schools when Stiles meanders over to ask, but he doesn’t do a whole lot of mingling. He mostly hangs out in the kitchen with Melissa and spectates the rest of them - which clearly isn’t earning him any points with Argent, who lingers around their general vicinity in a way that Liam guesses is  _ supposed _ to be subtle - and throws the occasional glance back at the front door, but Liam’s good enough with that.

He also can’t help it when most of the rest of his tension fades out when Theo finally shows up about an hour after the gathering started, also right from work with multiple pizza boxes and a brown paper bag full of fries in hand. He can’t help the smile he gets on his face when he sees him, since Liam was kind of getting worried that he might not show up at all, and he doesn’t feel bad about it when he hops up off the couch to go meet him. 

The kitchen is kind of a chaotic mess now that the food has arrived, Liam watching as Theo narrowly avoids losing an arm when multiple people descend on the boxes before he can even set them all the way down on the counter, but he manages to worm his way through the crowd to get to him. Liam grabs a paper plate off of the table and nudges past Lydia and Kira to get in line next to Theo. He ignores Stiles’s scalded-cat noise of complaint when he cuts in front of him, too focused on other priorities.

“Hey,” Liam says softly, bumping his shoulder, and it comes out much more easily than he would have expected it to just a few hours earlier. Something about seeing Theo here, with him and their pack and a paper plate in hand, is comforting and has him briefly forgetting about the circumstances. His heart barely even feels like it’s being wrenched out of his chest this time as Theo gives him a small smile, and Liam is willing to take that as a good thing. “How was your day?”

“Busy,” Theo says with a shrug, yawning through a deep breath. 

“Tiring?” 

“Yeah,” Theo laughs breathily as they reach the pizza boxes. One is already empty, which Theo puts aside before breaking open the new one and pulling out two slices of cheese for Liam and two of pepperoni for himself. He slides them onto Liam’s plate and Liam smiles at him gratefully. “Jess came to visit today,” He mentions casually as he shuts the box.

Liam almost chokes on the fry in his mouth. “Oh?” He asks, voice sounding a little too light as he tries to figure out if he should feel betrayed or not. 

“Yeah,” Theo says with a smirk. “Said that you came to the store and had to go through the line two times to buy two things.”

“Oh,” Liam laughs in a way that sounds more punched-out than anything. “Yeah. You know, I see why you two are friends. You both love to make fun of me behind my back,” He snarks.

“Don’t worry, I don’t make fun of you,” Theo says, nudging Liam on the back when Stiles’s sighs of impatience get too hard to ignore. “... _ That _ much.”

The two of them take their spots on the couch as Liam squawks indignantly, the TV still loudly playing the Mario Kart theme right in front of them, to eat their pizza. Theo gives Liam some pretty short answers as he tries to wheedle details of his day out of him, but their knees are pressed together and Theo smells good and their hands keep brushing because Liam has the absolute unexaggerated  _ blessing _ of being left-handed while Theo uses his right, so all of his questions are truly out of nothing but innocent interest. Tonight, he lets things be natural, not examining every twitch of Theo’s expression or dip in his voice.

He’s not even thinking about the fact that Stilinski is still keeping watch from the kitchen until they’re finished with their pizza and the plates are set on the end table. Malia and Mason have started to make their way back into the room and the theme still hasn’t stopped playing, so Liam nods up to the screen, already starting to smile. “Want to play around? Malia won by, like, a  _ second _ last time, and she’s way too cocky about that,” He says, already remembering the last pack meeting a few weeks back where he’d watched Malia and Theo push each other off of the couch multiple times just trying to get the upper hand over each other while Mason was stuck in the middle yelling over getting hit with shell after shell. He’d pay to see any variant of that again.

Liam reaches for the controllers on the coffee table and holds one out, waiting for Theo to grin as he always does and take the remote he’s passing him, but instead he leans back against the couch a little more and sighs. 

“Not this time,” Theo says like it’s nothing, voice tired. He looks around at a few other people in the room, and his eyes are well back to distant by the time they reach Liam again and look away. Liam’s chest  _ pangs. _

“Oh...You sure?” Liam asks, still holding the controller out for him, but just like he hadn’t changed his mind about that long-forgotten cranberry coffee, Theo doesn’t change his mind about this one either. He just takes in a deep breath through his nose, shuts his eyes, and rests his head against the back of the couch. “We...we can play just the two of us…”

“Sorry, just not tonight. Tired,” Theo breathes. At least he does sound somewhat apologetic about it.

Liam swallows. “Oh,” He chokes out. “...It was really that busy?”

“Sure,” Theo says, and Liam’s good mood completely siphons out. It’s gone far more quickly than how it’d come, leaving him feeling numb and helpless again, and of course, that’s the moment that he chooses to look up and find the Sheriff already staring at him.

Liam has never been good at reading faces that aren’t Theo’s or Mason’s or  _ maybe _ Corey’s, but he knows that whatever’s on Stilinski’s right now isn’t anything he wants to see.

\---

Liam and Theo end up going home together at the end of the night, Liam getting into the passenger seat of Theo’s truck since Mason had driven him to the meeting in the first place. It’s never happened before, but Liam finds himself longing for the sex-permeated interior of Mason’s car that’s always playing odd music through the speakers as he climbs in, looking regretfully back at Scott’s house. He notices for the millionth time the way that  _ Theo’s _ truck smells a little like the pizzas that he spends all day carting around town and a  _ lot _ like Theo himself, but he notices for the  _ first _ time that when it’s paired with the silence hanging between them, it’s not comforting at all. The smell of Theo and his cologne, the same one Liam had stolen from his bedroom the day he’d gone to spy on him in the woods and that he’d sprayed a little extra of into the hood of his favorite sweatshirt, does nothing but make the jumble of worries in his mind feel that much more tangled. He listens to Theo breathe over the hum of the engine and the clicking of the turn signals, for once wishing that he wasn’t this close to him as he tries not to suffocate.

His entire body feels like a tightly-pulled knot by the time they get home, all of his muscles tense; The way he walks through the back door and into the kitchen has him feeling like a marionette on its strings. The kitchen is just as quiet as the ride back had been save for the clinking sound of Theo’s keys on the marble countertop and the deep breath Liam indulges in as soon as Theo’s back is turned. 

While Liam tries to catch his breath and gather his wits again, Theo heads straight for the cabinet above the sink for a glass to fill at the sink like nothing is different at all. Liam’s mouth feels dry as he watches him, hands rubbing up and down his thighs anxiously, but it has nothing to do with the water. 

“I think I’m just going to go to bed,” Liam murmurs, ignoring that the clock on the stove says that it’s only nine. His voice comes out croakier than usual, a stab of nervousness picking at his chest when he hears himself, but if Theo notices, he doesn’t bother to acknowledge. 

All he gives in response is an absent  _ ‘goodnight’ _ between sips of water, one that Liam returns quietly as he goes for the stairs. He doesn’t feel quite alone enough until his bedroom door is securely shut behind him and he’s backed up against the wood, but being alone doesn’t mean feeling  _ better.  _ The unsettled feeling in his stomach still rolls around uncomfortably as he drops his head back against the door, eyes squeezing shut tightly. He just wants this all to be  _ over _ already.

\---

It takes Liam forever to fall asleep that night. Between the tossing and the turning and the way his legs keep getting tangled up in the sheets that either feel too hot or too cold on his skin, going to sleep feels like an impossible feat that he’s about to give up on when it finally takes him out of pure exhaustion. He finally drifts off laying on his stomach, one arm thrust underneath the pillow in a weak attempt to smother his face and the other one hanging off the bed along with one foot, a permanent annoyed expression on slack muscles pressed into the pillow, but even then, his sleep is fitful.

He dreams throughout the night, fleeting pictures of things that are too fast or too vague for him to understand, but he doesn’t wake up from a dream at all. Somewhere between the early hours of one and two in the morning - he doesn’t have the mind to check the specifics - instinct brings him back awake. The unsettled feeling has moved up to his chest this time, growing bigger and bigger and pressing down on his lungs to constrict air, and he opens his eyes into the dark room with an immediate sense of confused urgency that only gets so much worse when he realizes why.

There are no heartbeats in the house.

Jenna is away with her friends for the night and David is working a long shift and Theo  _ \- Theo is gone,  _ Liam realizes with a start. Theo should be in his room, peacefully - or  _ un- _ peacefully, for that matter - sleeping the labors of his long day away, but the house is silent apart from Liam’s heartbeat that’s ratcheting up in panic. 

Liam tries not to let that panic get the best of him, but it’s easily starting to overtake everything else and his hands are shaky as he tosses off his covers. He absently yanks at the lamp cord and grabs his phone off the charger before he leaves his room, but he’s out in the hallway in bare feet before he can do much else. 

His next set of moves are, just like how he’d woken up, pure instinct. He pushes Theo’s door open unceremoniously to find it completely empty, untouched like he’d never been there at all, and instead of looking around, he moves onto the next door. The bathroom is opened up to see nothing but the early-morning darkness, Liam’s parents’ room as vacant as it should be, movement in the home office stagnant, the living room and kitchen barren. Liam checks all of those rooms and all of the others one, two,  _ three _ times over again as if Theo could somehow be  _ hiding _ in any of them, and as his heartbeat kicks up faster and his breathing becomes light and frantic, he goes back up the stairs again.

He ends up knocking Theo’s door right into the wall with accidental force in his haste to get back in, but he barely pays any attention to the loud noise. There’s no care in the way he checks the room this time around, shaky hands slipping on handles and elbows knocking things to the ground with reckless abandon. He checks to see if anything important has been taken, and as far as he can tell, there’s nothing - his laptop is still in the desk drawer, his phone charger is still plugged into the wall outlet, and there aren’t any large chunks of clothes missing - but the fact of the matter is that Theo is still  _ gone. _

Liam starts to wonder as he looks around if it’s all over, if the worst has already happened or if it's too far in progress for him to stop it, and he feels like he’s failed.  _ Maybe,  _ he thinks helplessly, running a hand through his hair and gripping the strands towards the top of his hair hard enough that some come loose,  _ Theo hasn’t  _ bothered _ taking any of his things because he knows he won’t be coming back to  _ need _ them. _ Maybe he hasn’t taken anything from this room because he knows he won’t need them wherever he’s going, or maybe it’s because he never wanted to take anything from the Geyers. Liam’s eyes land on the perfectly-made bed in the corner -  _ proving his worth, proving his  _ place _ there _ \- at the same moment that his phone buzzes in his hand.

He’s too petrified to startle, too petrified to look at the caller ID. He just puts the phone up to his ear with a shaky but quick hand, the other one still in his hair and his eyes still frantically flitting around the room. “Hello?” Liam answers, throat clicking with how dry it is. 

“Liam, it’s Noah,” Stilinski says on the other end of the line. Liam doesn’t even flinch. His eyes land back on the bed. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you this late, but I was looking through some old cases I brought back from work and realized that my keys are missing. Now, it could just be my  _ miscreant _ of a son, but-”

“He’s not here,” Liam interrupts before Stilinski can even ask. The other end of the line goes quiet, Liam swallowing hard as hopelessness starts to settle in. “H-he’s not here. It doesn’t look like he’s been gone long and it doesn’t look like he took anything with him, but he’s not here.”

Liam doesn’t realize just how destroyed his voice sounds until he hears the second of a pause the Sheriff has to take before a sharp intake of breath and a heavy sigh. _ “Jesus,”  _ Stilinski whispers, Liam nodding silently to himself as his eyes stay fixed on Theo’s bed.  _ “Jesus.  _ I’ll meet you at the station in twenty.”

The unspoken agreement is so certain that Stilinski doesn’t even wait for Liam to answer before he hangs up just a second later, the call dropping with a low beep in Liam’s ear that he barely hears. He lets the call drop out entirely before he slips his phone into the pocket of his sweatpants, tears his eyes away from Theo’s bedroom, and takes off running, not even caring about his still-bare feet on pavement as he crosses the threshold of the front door.

With Liam’s supernatural speed and the Sheriff’s disregard and abuse of power towards his own traffic laws, they get there even sooner than planned. Liam meets him in the dimly-lit parking lot as the Sheriff gets out of his car, having beaten Liam there by just a second, and they share one grim look as they set off towards the front together. Halfway there, Liam notices Theo’s truck in the parking lot and has the frame of mind to run his hand over the hood, finding it still warm - he hasn’t been here too long. 

The sight that meets them when they push through the front doors of the Sheriff’s station isn’t a good one. The first thing Liam sees in the dim room is a deputy knocked out at his desk, head down on his keyboard and typing out a constant stream of  _ F’s _ into his half-filed report as a deep purple bruise starts to form on his opposite cheek, and he’s only the first of five. A quick and nervous two-finger check done by the Sheriff tells them that he’s still alive as Liam scans the rest of the floor, surveying the evidence of the fight in the scattered papers and knocked-over monitors and likely-concussed bodies laying on the floor, a sick feeling in his stomach. 

It’s at the same moment that Liam gets done assessing their statuses - all alive, thankfully - that he catches movement in the dark Sheriff’s office. Through the window, Liam can already see from there that Theo’s standing in the office, back turned to the half-open door with his hands digging through the filing cabinet next to the Sheriff’s desk, and Liam’s heart drops. Stilinski sees him at the same time as Liam, rushing off to get to him just behind him.

Despite the Sheriff’s best attempts, Liam gets there before he does, and with a lot less grace. One supposed-to-be-subtle push at the door sends it crashing into the wall, but Theo doesn’t even flinch. He pauses but stays hunched over the cabinet, file still caught between his fingers, nothing changing except the look of blank resignation on his face. He had to have known they were coming, Liam thinks as he watches Theo slowly but surely straighten out his back and stand up. 

_ “Theo,”  _ Liam whispers brokenly into the air, voice hurt and confused as he meets Theo’s unreadable eyes. The Sheriff stands by his side, a serious and disappointed look on his face. Liam doesn’t know what to  _ do. _ “What are you  _ doing?” _

Realistically, Liam knows that he’s seen a lot worse. He’s seen a Wendigo’s teeth dripping with fresh blood. He’s been haunted by the visions of the Berserkers for the better part of three years. He’s watched his first love be ripped out of conscious reality and then watched his old friend die in the middle of a dark street just weeks later. He’s seen a lot in his life, a lot of acrid blood and salty tears and cold death, but he thinks that Theo’s face as he stands behind the Sheriff’s desk with the file folder in his hands is the worst.

All Theo does for a few seconds is  _ look _ at them, eyes lingering on Liam for just a split second longer than the Sheriff before flitting back down to the folder in his hands. His eyebrows pinch together and his lips tip down in a tiny frown as if he’s just now realizing that it’s over. 

Of all the things Liam expects him to say, something either artificially-innocent or wry and biting, it’s not what comes out of Theo’s mouth. “Nothing,” he says, pure and simple and  _ truthful,  _ starting to shake his head. Liam watches, his breath feeling like it’s been punched out of him, as Theo slowly breaks down into something small and timid. His fingers spasm around the manilla folder before dropping the folder down onto the Sheriff’s desk; it hits the wood flat with a resounding  _ slap _ that almost makes Liam reel back. The Sheriff looks at it critically, but Liam’s eyes stay fixed on Theo’s tight-faced expression. His throat works as he swallows. “I was just...trying to see where she is,” Theo mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets. He takes one out only to produce the Sheriff’s missing key ring, which he tosses down onto the desk next to the file. The move is careless, defeated, like he’s done with it all. “I’m sorry.”

Liam watches, stunned and confused by the blankness of Theo’s tone, as Theo steps away from the desk and starts to walk towards them - and then right past them. Theo doesn’t meet his eyes no matter how much Liam is silently  _ begging _ him to, chest constricting and stomach swirling with heavy nausea at the absolutely  _ suffocating _ scent of bitter sadness in the room, but Theo ghosts right past him, and the Sheriff makes no move to stop it. The two of them stand there in the doorway, neither of them having the thought to worry about the sound of Theo’s truck rumbling to a start and pulling out of the parking lot.

They don’t care about that or the passed-out deputies or knocked-over desk chairs. Liam’s eyes are glued to the file folder sitting on the desk, the one that Theo hadn’t even gotten to break the tape seal of before he’d tossed it down like it was everything and nothing.

Liam approaches the desk slowly, cautiously as if the file itself is something he shouldn’t touch, but he skims his fingers over the smooth manilla paper anyway. The tab at the top of the folder is blank, empty, but Liam knows where it came from - there are tons of other files in tons of other file cabinets in a room in the back of the precinct, back behind the holding cells and vending machines, all solved cases and ordinary records - but looking into the still-open cabinet that this one was taken from, he can tell it’s  _ anything _ but ordinary. This folder came from the same cabinet that holds records like  _ Scott’s, _ records like  _ Liam’s,  _ records like  _ Theo’s,  _ all of the people of interest who have had to be hidden away from the other unknowing officers’ eyes, and this one is even unmarked. 

The Sheriff doesn’t try to stop him from opening the file, but Liam doesn’t wait for his permission, either. With a shaky hand and a deep breath, he cuts the tape seal with one claw and breaks it open, setting it back down on the desk and leaning on it to look over it. His eyes scan over the first few pages in the file, all legalese and police terms that Liam doesn’t understand. He doesn’t really see  _ anything _ particularly interesting in this file until he flips to a new page and finds one document that changes  _ everything _ that’s happened in the past few weeks.

It’s a coroner’s report,  _ “Raeken, Tara Hailey”  _ typed into the top left corner.

Liam’s breathing stutters to a full stop.

_ Raeken, Tara Hailey,  _ died August twenty-seventh at fourteen years old. Five feet, four inches, one-hundred seventeen pounds. Probable cause of death: Hypothermic shock, subsequent animal attack. Found an estimated twelve hours after death with a broken right leg, cracked-open ribs, and multiple missing organs.

It’s August twenty-sixth today, Liam realizes, blood  _ pounding _ in his ears. _ It’s August twenty-sixth today, _ and as Liam stares down at  _ that _ date and  _ her _ name on the  _ autopsy report, _ everything suddenly makes sense.

The unmarked August calendar. The flightiness. The guilt. The detachment. _ ‘I was just trying to see where she is.’ _

This is the first year in a decade that Theo’s August hasn’t been taken up by some other life-threatening event, the first year that Theo has the chance and time to try to  _ grieve, _ and Liam feels like the  _ biggest fucking asshole _ in the world.

He thinks he really might be sick. Good-naturedly or not, Liam had been so _sneaky,_ so _suspicious_ of Theo even after all of the times that he’s watched Theo prove himself _over_ and _over_ again, and he’d come into this office guns-blazing and ready to throw all of that to the side only to find Theo trying to find out where his _sister_ _is_ _buried._

“Liam?” Stilinski asks quietly, coming towards him. Liam doesn’t take his eyes off of the file, but he does hear the sharp breath the Sheriff takes when he catches sight of which one it is.

_ “I-” _ Liam stammers. He swallows, throat clicking dryly as his eyes begin to sting. “I have to go,” He chokes out. The only things he manages to do before tears start to fall are tuck the folder under his arm, kick the file cabinet shut, and speed out of the station like he was never there at all, everything else be damned.

\---

Theo isn’t there when Liam finishes the long walk home, not that he blames him in the slightest. His scent is just as weak there as it’d been before Liam had left and there’s nothing new taken from his room, proving that Theo had never come back, but against all of his instincts, Liam still knows that he has to let Theo be. His instincts have, after all, failed them both a lot lately.

Standing in Theo’s doorway, Liam looks at his room again. Perfectly-made bed. Laptop in the drawer. Phone charger in the wall. He takes some time only to straighten it back up again, his own silent form of apology for going through his things in the first place. Liam’s scent will linger around the things he’s touched that he had no right to, but he wants to think that it’ll be less insulting of a discovery this way.

The last thing he does before he crawls back into his own bed and hides his face underneath the covers is text Theo a single  _ “I’m so sorry.” _ He doesn’t ask where Theo is or when he might be back or say anything else. He doesn’t even wait for Theo’s  _ read _ receipt to come up, no matter how much he really wants to. Instead, he shuts his phone off entirely, sets it face-down on the nightstand, and then tosses it underneath the bed when the mere sight of it is still too much. He feels so positively  _ vile _ that all he can do is shut his eyes, try not to cry, and hope to God that Theo might someday forgive him for this.

\---

Liam blinks himself awake the next morning to the smell of cooking food just like any other Saturday morning in the Dunbar-Geyer house, but this time, his first few seconds of blissful ignorance before his memory comes crashing back in is more of a reprieve than ever. He winces to himself almost as soon as he fully opens his eyes, shutting them back closed tightly and burying his face into his pillow. The start to a weekend has never felt quite so awful.

His stomach starts to turn as he takes in a deep breath, but he forces his way through it; today is a new day, and one that he has to face as well as he can. Downstairs, he can hear the sounds of breakfast sizzling on the stove, food hitting plates, and most of all, three separate heartbeats - Theo is home. 

Liam is as grateful and relieved for that fact as he is anxious. It’s good that Theo isn’t trying to avoid him by being out on the streets, but it also means that Liam is going to have to go down and face the music on a day that’s already going to be tough. The sight of  _ ‘August 27th’ _ on his lockscreen when Liam retrieves his phone out from under his bed makes his chest throb painfully, and he pushes his way out of bed to distract from it.

At least he isn’t going in completely unprepared, Liam reminds himself silently as his feet hit the floor, taking a deep breath. He stands up with a sigh, rubs his hand over his hair to flatten it down a little, and heads over to his dresser and the mirror above it. Normally he’s never dressed before breakfast on a Saturday morning, plans or not, but today is important, and he’s not planning on sticking around the house for too long anyway. He gets dressed in a simple pair of jeans and a shirt but tries his very best to make himself look as presentable and put-together as possible. He smooths his hair out again and runs a comb through it, but deep down, Liam knows that the anxious expression on his face that he can’t rid himself of overrules all of it. 

But he has to ignore it. Breakfast is almost ready and waiting, and so is Theo. 

He makes his way down slowly, hand gripping onto the bannister like it’s the one thing holding him onto Earth, and takes in the sight before him before he’s even halfway down the stairs. David is already sitting at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee and the daily news on his tablet, Jenna is standing at the counter and flipping pancakes on the electric griddle, and Theo, Liam notes with a sad pang, is standing right by her and holding out a big plate for her to deposit them onto like it’s just another morning. 

Jenna and David look up at him on the stairs and smile when they notice him there, offering happy  _ ‘good-mornings’ _ to him, but Theo doesn’t do the same; he stays completely still, not bothering to even glance back over his shoulder, and Liam can’t blame him for that no matter how badly it hurts him. He makes his way the rest of the way into the kitchen, guilt and apprehension making his muscles tense as he sits down at his usual spot across from David where there’s already an empty plate waiting for him. 

He waits quietly for breakfast to be finished cooking, too wired to distract himself with his phone but too upset to try for any casual conversation, so he ends up just sitting there for a while. His index finger traces the strains of darker marble in the countertop as he watches Jenna and Theo work as subtly as he can. This close, Liam can see the muscles in Theo’s back shift with each move he makes, ever-mesmerizing and always-impressive, but he’s more focused on the tense set to his shoulders that he’s very clearly acting as though isn’t there.

He hopes to get even a tiny bit of eye contact from Theo when the pancakes have finally all come off of the griddle, looking up at him as optimistically as he can when Theo comes over with the big plate, but Theo ignores him. He doesn’t meet Liam’s eyes as he dishes out three pancakes onto his plate for him and moves right on to do the same for Jenna and David, serving himself last. When he’s done he sits down in his regular place next to Liam, which he guesses is a good sign, but it still doesn’t feel right.

Despite his parents always joking that Liam is a black hole when it comes to food, he can barely eat his breakfast that morning. The pancakes are good, but the way he drowns them in syrup is too sweet and heavy for him today. He ends up just pushing them around his plate for a while, making them even more soggy and unpleasant when he finally forces himself to swallow, and it doesn’t go unnoticed. Theo eats his food as normally as ever, but both of them are quiet, and even though Liam won’t look at anyone directly, he can tell that his mother is looking at them with concern. Liam tries not to think about her prying eyes and listens to the sound of Theo’s heart, beating slow and steady right next to him, and wants to cry.

David and Liam do the dishes after breakfast to thank Theo and Jenna for cooking. Liam hates doing the dishes, but he does it without even the slightest complaint; Theo is still at the island scrolling on his phone, and he won’t dare to speak, especially not about something so unimportant. Liam knows that Theo’s not looking at him, but there’s still a burning sensation on the back of his neck that has Liam cleaning as efficiently as he possibly can just to get it over with. He does most of the dishes himself instead of going slow enough that someone else ends up speeding through them in comparison, David giving him an impressed look when they finish within ten minutes, and then waits for David to leave. He doesn’t disappoint - David dries his hands off on the towel hanging over the oven handle, slings it lightly over Liam’s shoulder, and then leaves them alone in the kitchen.

Liam takes a deep, grounding breath as he pulls the towel off of his shoulder and dries his own hands. _ This is it, _ he thinks, closing his eyes for a second.  _ This is your chance to make things right.  _ With one more breath, Liam straightens his spine, turns around, and starts towards Theo.

He gets a quick glimpse of Jess’s name at the top of Theo’s phone screen as he types, briefly wondering if Theo’s talking about him, but he shakes the thought off and forces himself to focus. “Hey,” Liam says softly, voice a little croaky from disuse, as he puts his hands in his pockets. Theo switches off his screen and finally looks up at Liam, eyes still completely unreadable, and the fingers of Liam’s right hand curl around the keys in his pocket both out of nervousness and necessity. He pulls them out a second later with a shaky breath to show them to him. Pushing past his anxiety, he keeps his eyes on Theo’s. “Let’s go for a drive.”

Liam doesn’t make it sound like a question. It comes out more like a command and he has to suck in a short breath when he realizes it. He knows how that sentence - _ “Let’s go for a drive” -  _ sounds. _ “Let’s go for a drive”  _ can mean any number of things, but in Liam’s experience, it’s almost always a gateway into something serious. 

_ “Let’s go for a drive”  _ had been what his mother had said to him before they drove all the way around Beacon Hills twice as she’d tried to explain in gentle terms what divorce is and why it was happening to their family, even though Liam was thirteen and sitting in the front seat. They’d both  _ known _ that Liam knew what it was and why it was happening and that he’d been expecting it for a while with every missed family dinner and harsh word and failure to return home, but it hadn’t made it any easier to hear.  _ “Let’s go for a drive”  _ was what had been said to him so that he couldn’t escape the conversation with Jenna and David the summer after eighth grade about putting him into therapy and getting him medication for his IED. He’d sat in the backseat of the car as shame threatened to choke him at the timid, cautious way his parents had spoken to him, like they were afraid he’d snap all over again just like he had at the last lacrosse practice he’d been to.  _ “Let’s go for a drive” _ was what Jenna also started with the day she finally worked up the courage in Liam’s junior year of high school to ask why he’d been acting so different and distant. Liam had made her pull over to the side of the road because she shouldn’t have been driving when she heard about all of it, and there she’d brushed her fingertips just underneath glowing gold eyes that brimmed with tears at the same time her blues did, and they’d sat there, and they’d both cried, and they’d gone home with pressure headaches. 

_ “Let’s go for a drive” _ is still a phrase that makes Liam’s stomach churn today, and he didn’t think he’d have to say it himself for a long, long time, but then again, it isn’t always bad. _ “Let’s go for a drive”  _ had been what started the ride where Jenna told Liam about David when they’d started seeing each other and then the one where David had told Liam that he wanted to marry his mother.  _ “Let’s go for a drive”  _ was how Liam found out that his parents had gotten done thinking it over and would let Theo move into the guest room.  _ “Let’s go for a drive” _ has been the start of things like surprise family vacations, the start of good opportunities, the start of new beginnings. It’s not always all bad.

But Liam’s not sure how this drive is going to go just yet. All he knows is that he has no clue what he’s going to do if Theo says no like he probably deserves, which is why he almost slumps over in relief when Theo finally nods and starts getting out of his seat. Liam jumps out of the way so that he can get up and head back to his room to get dressed, rushing off to go tell his parents that he’s leaving before he can lose his nerve, and is back in the kitchen in time that he can meet Theo so they can walk to his car together.

They don’t actually end up talking very much on the ride, but that’s okay - even though most of his experiences weren’t about the destination, this one is. Liam punches the place into his phone’s Map app and sets it up on the holder on the dashboard, makes sure that Theo’s settled in, and then sets off without a word spoken between them.

Theo keeps his eyes trained somewhere out of the passenger-side window, Liam throwing sideways glances at him whenever he can, listening to his deep, steady breathing. Theo doesn’t mention the soft music that starts playing automatically through the bluetooth speaker in the car, doesn’t mouth the words or even nod his head to the beat even though it’s an album that they both like, doesn’t even comment on it when Liam accidentally takes a turn that’s a little too wide. It does admittedly start to grate on Liam’s nerves a little after a while, but he deals with it by tightening his fingers on the steering wheel, reminding himself that he’s doing this for a reason and pushing forward -  _ figuratively, _ of course. Getting a speeding ticket on a serious drive would rip any authority Liam has over this situation out of his already-struggling hands.

Luckily, Liam avoids any traffic violations since Beacon Hills isn’t very far from the coast. He watches out of the corner of his eye as Theo starts looking around at their changing surroundings as they get closer, curiosity clearly cracking at the edges of his stoicness by the time Liam pulls the car up to a sand-dusted curb.

Theo takes a second to get out at first, apparently waiting for Liam to lean into the open space of his door to prompt him. “Come on,” he says, nodding towards the rickety set of wooden stairs leading up to a path over the currently empty sand dunes of Santa Monica. Theo looks at him, probably more incredulous than confused, but ends up following anyway.

Their shoulders brush and bump as they walk up the stairs and into the sand, silently agreeing to abandon their shoes on the way, and they don’t stop walking until they’ve just about hit water. The sand is cool between Liam’s toes, the sun obscured by clouds, which means that the water is cold enough to make him shiver when it washes over them next. He stares down at it with Theo, grey as it reflects the sky, until he feels Theo’s expectant eyes on the side of his face and knows it’s time. 

“I’m sorry,” Liam blurts out, preemptively fast - he knows Theo, and he knows that one long-suffering sigh Theo does whenever Liam tries to apologize for anything is coming before he can even start. “Theo, I’m  _ serious, stop-” _ Liam rushes out, but Theo goes right over him.

“Liam, it’s  _ fine.  _ I don’t  _ care,”  _ Theo says, the first words he’s spoken to him all morning, and something in Liam’s chest twinges painfully when Theo’s heartbeat skips despite what’s probably his best effort at stopping it. 

“No, it’s  _ not _ fine,” Liam insists, voice going desperate as Theo’s mouth opens to speak again. “It’s  _ not, _ and-”

“Liam-”

“It’s  _ not,  _ and it  _ wasn’t!  _ It  _ wasn’t fine!” _ Liam bites back. Theo looks at him for a second, then scoffs and looks back out over the water with a rueful smile on his face. Liam sucks in a deep breath through his nose and holds it, needing to ground himself. It takes a minute for him to be able to talk without yelling again. “I knew something was up with you, and instead of  _ asking _ you about it, I...I went right to the worst-case scenario.”

“And I  _ said _ I don’t care,” Theo emphasizes, making it really hard for Liam to stay as calm as he wants to be for this. He turns back to look at Liam, eyes narrowed, but with no malice in his voice at all. “We both know who I am, Liam. What I’ve done. What else were you  _ supposed _ to do?”

Liam’s attempts at calmness fly right out the window at that.  _ “Trust you!” _ He exclaims. Theo rolls his eyes and Liam  _ hates _ it, hates how quick he is to brush even the  _ concept _ of something like trust right off of him like he knows he’s never going to get it. “I was supposed to  _ trust you!  _ Not go behind your back with the fucking  _ Sheriff _ like- like some kind of  _ ameteur investigator!” _ Theo doesn’t roll his eyes again, but Liam can tell that it’s a near thing. “But I just…” Liam trails, shoulders slumping in. He feels defeated as he looks at Theo, small, stupid like some little kid. “I just want you to know that I didn’t  _ want _ to catch you doing anything. I didn’t  _ want _ to think that you were doing anything bad, and I was  _ surprised _ when it started to look like you were. I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t... _ self-sabotaging,  _ or-or stuck in some situation that you couldn’t  _ get out of-”  _ Theo looks at him sharply with that one; He  _ always _ hates it whenever Liam tries to imply that his past wasn’t all his fault. No matter how much seemingly everyone else has accepted that as fact, Theo still won’t. Liam closes his mouth with an audible clack and sighs, reminding himself where he was going - now isn’t the time. “But it doesn’t matter. Either way, I went behind your back, and that  _ sucks, _ and I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven,” Theo says after a second of waiting to make sure Liam’s really done. He can tell that he’s telling the truth by the cynical, tired intonation to his voice and the way his heartbeat sounds steady this time around. Liam doesn’t know if that makes him feel better or worse. “Now will you stop apologizing?”

Liam bites his lip.  _ “...Sorry,” _ He whispers weakly, and Theo thankfully isn’t fed up with him enough yet to give him a hard time for it.

He has to take a minute to gather himself back up after that, staring at the wet sand beneath him, but Theo’s focus has slid elsewhere. Liam can vaguely see him looking around at everything, and it occurs to him, not for the first time, that Theo probably hasn’t been to the beach in years. It’s a shame that he isn’t there under different circumstances, that Theo isn’t listening to the roaring water and watching the seagulls fly overhead on a day that’s sunnier and not as sad as this one.

“So, what,” Theo starts after a minute. “Is there a reason that we’re standing on an empty beach at nine in the morning, or did you just want some nice scenery for your unnecessary heart-to-heart?”

Liam notes that his voice is dry and amused, getting back to normal and growing stronger with each word, and maybe he’d ordinarily smile or crack some dumb joke back -  _ What, a guy can’t add a little romance to a situation?  _ \- to follow along and break the tension even further, but he doesn’t, because -

“No, actually,” Liam says, completely serious. Theo’s little smirk doesn’t drop off of his face immediately when he turns to look at Liam, but his expression does turn into something more curious. Liam takes a deep breath of the ocean air. “After you left, I...I took the file that you had in your hand.” Next to him, Theo tenses, just a little; Liam swallows around nothing, just a little. His voice still comes out tight and struggling. “And it took me a minute to understand what you meant when you said that you...but once I  _ did…” _

“Yeah,” Theo says quietly, eyes dropping down towards the sand as he gives a weak nod. Liam swallows again.

“Yeah,” He breathes back, feeling heavy as lead weight. “But the point is...the point is that Tara wasn’t buried,” He says. “...She was cremated.” Liam leaves out the part of the file that had gone over ceremonial proceedings and the reasoning behind why their parent had chosen the way they did, leaves out the part where they’d said that her body had been too mangled and destroyed for them to feel right about laying her to rest that way. Theo knows that part better than anyone. “...And respectfully scattered,” Liam continues with a short clear of his throat. “She, um, had apparently mentioned some preference as to where she wanted that to be.”  _ Even though she’d been so young,  _ Liam also leaves out. Theo knows that part too.

Theo still doesn’t look up from the sand at first, but Liam can see the exact moment that it clicks for him - Theo’s always been smart, the smartest person that Liam has ever known. It doesn’t take him long. He hears the sound of Theo’s next breath shuddering into his lungs and his own heart skips when he blinks and his eyes open up to look at the ocean a second later. 

_“Oh,”_ Theo says, the most timid Liam’s ever heard him. _ “...Oh.” _

“Yeah.”

Theo stares over the rolling water, and predictably enough, doesn’t say anything else. Liam doesn’t push. The silence that falls between them is heavy with the rawness of regret and guilt and grief, but even through the way Liam’s chest positively aches for him, he can recognize how normal this kind of quiet is again, how comforting it feels now that it’s just the two of them here.

As Theo’s eyes go glassy looking at the water, rippling with the muted light of the cloud-covered sun, Liam looks at him. He keeps his face turned the same way as Theo’s, not wanting to interrupt his train of thought, but his chin is ever so slightly tilted down towards his chest and his eyes trace the lines of profile, and he’s quiet, but he wants to say  _ so much _ more. He wants to tell him that he’s sorry about Tara, turn to him and look him in the eyes and tell him that he believes that when she’s not in a nightmare or a manufactured hellscape, she’s understanding; she looks down at Theo and sees the little boy standing scared on the bridge above the creek that night, and she forgives, even if Theo doesn’t. He wants to apologize again for what he did, take Theo’s face in his palms and hold him and tell him that he’s sorry he ever doubted him, wants to tell him how far he’s come and that he’s  _ noticed _ and that it hasn’t all just been thrown away because Liam is an idiot. He wants to fall to his knees in the sand, reach up while he’s down and take Theo’s hands in his own like they’re in some corny romance movie and this is the climax and tell him that he trusts him and needs him and  _ loves _ him even though he has a shit way of showing it sometimes, even if the only way he’s ever been able to try to so far is in fleeting moments like this one.

But he doesn’t, because Theo doesn’t need any of that right now. He stands quietly by Theo’s side and lets him be there in the moment on his own, independent but not alone, because that’s what he does need. His eyes are a little further away now, his stance a little less tense and he sways a little in place with each breath he takes, but he doesn’t try to snap him out of it or change it in any way. No matter how much he wants to tell Theo, how much he wants to show Theo about how he’s felt these past few weeks and in the many many months before them, it isn’t his time - but that’s not to say that he stops their fingers from brushing as they stand and Theo leans a little closer. It’s not to say that he pulls away when it keeps happening, and it’s certainly not to say that he keeps Theo from slowly, clumsily linking their hands together and squeezing.

It’s not a verbal thank-you, and he won’t get one for a while - not as they trudge back up the sand dunes when Theo’s done taking his time, not as they get back in the car and not as they ride back to the house with the music turned up just a little louder and their lips mouthing the lyrics that time, not for the rest of today or tomorrow or this week or this month. That verbal thank-you won’t come until years down the line, years down the line around this time of summer on the first day that Theo not only falls asleep in Liam’s bed but wakes up in it the next morning too, tangled in his arms and blinking himself awake slowly without the force of a nightmare pounding in his chest for the first time in months, but today, this is enough.

Standing on this shore, icy cold water washing up to their ankles now as the tide comes in, Liam tries not to break into a million tiny pieces and scare Theo away. The last of his apologies dying on his tongue, Liam squeezes Theo’s hand a little tighter, and it’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> You made it through!! As always, thank you so much for reading!!
> 
> This fic was honestly really a Trip...I forget where I even got the original concept idea, it's completely pre-relationship with a single hand-holding scene, and it's also RIDICULOUSLY long. Proofreading and editing took me two days. I did the last of it on my phone because I couldn't stare at my computer screen for any longer without feeling like my brain wanted to melt. I can't believe it even got finished, to be honest with you - but I'm really glad it did anyway, because this fic marks my half-million word count mark on ao3!! I'm not sure how far towards this goal I was when I went on that weird writer's block stretch back in August of 2020 and started purging all of the stuff that wasn't finished, but even if that is the case, hey...I'm back there again! Here's to 500k. Now the next question is - how long will it take me to get to a million? With my long ass sentence structuring and inability to keep ANYTHING at an appropriate length, it could be just a couple more months.
> 
> And I saved some dates for you guys in case you were curious about the weird August holidays mentioned in this fic! National Creamsicle day is August 14, World Elephant Day is August 12, International Cat Day is August 8, and National Stuffed Green Bell Peppers (????) Day is August 28. Perhaps Theo would like to recover with a pepper? Who knows. August is also apparently "Admit You're Happy Month," Which I kind of wanted to include somewhere, but considering that the whole fic was about Theo's sister dying I thought that might be a little mean.
> 
> Okay, okay. I'm going to stop typing out these notes now. I'm getting further away from March 9th as I speak.
> 
> Comments and constructive criticism are always read, loved, and highly appreciated <3 you guys keep me going.  
> \- Emma (grenadinepeach on tumblr)


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